The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

  Well--there were men once and there may be again. I have a friend, nameless of course, who bases his trouble on having been rejected by a woman. And he completely forgets the literally hundreds of women who accepted him. I told him that in a letter recently and I don't know how it will go down with him.

  I'm serious today, perhaps because I have had a tussle with a section of Merlin in rewriting. I knew what I wanted to say and couldn't find the words for it. But I will, because I have time.

  Jumping back a paragraph--I've been rejected by some, but my God some wonderful ones have accepted me. To forget that would be foolish and to brood on the others would be like brooding because everyone didn't like my looks. I'm grateful that some people do.

  TO CHASE--SOMERSET, APRIL 25, 1959

  The Cornish Dictionary is not necessary for this work but for future work, so by all means send it by boat. If we had known about it in time, Mary could have brought it. Any lexicons of this area will be valued by me. I hate to get into the Welsh because I can't pronounce it.

  I had an excellent day yesterday and got well into the Knight with the Two Swords--a strange and fated story. Hope I can bring something to the surface--the Invisible Knight, etc. and the utter savagery coupled with sweetness. Also I cut down a local hatchet to the shape of a Saxon axe for wood shaping and dug a garbage pit.

  My table-top tilt board came. Makes a draftsman's table of a card table. My neck and shoulders don't get so damned tired.

  TO ERO AND CHASE--SOMERSET, MAY 1, 1959

  Yesterday something wonderful. It was a golden day and the apple blossoms are out and for the first time I climbed up to Cadbury--Camelot. I don't think I remember an impact like that. Could see from the Bristol Channel to the tops of the Mendip Hills and all the little villages. Glastonbury tor and King Alfred's towers on the other side. I shall go back over and over but what a day to see it first. I walked all around the upper wall. And I don't know what I felt but it was a lot--like those slow hot bubbles of molten rock in a volcano, a gentle rumbling earthquake of the Spirit. I was ready for it too. I'll go back at night and in the rain, but this was noble gold even to use Tennyson's phrase--mystic--wonderful. Made the hairs prickle on the back of the neck. Mary is here and she went with us--and she was very moved. Tomorrow after work I'm going back to Glastonbury to the Abbey. I'm ready for that now too.

  I hope to finish the Knight with the Two Swords today. I do hope I've done it well. Merlin is out being typed. I don't know when it will be finished but I'll send it as soon as I check it over. I think Balin is good but I'll have to listen to it on tape before I'll really know. What a magic and fatal story it is.

  Now--there's something I want to ask. We are supposed to leave the country on or before June 11 and reenter. I was going to ask the Home Office for an extension rather than waste time and money for a rubber stamp in a passport. But if there was a reason, it would be different. Lying in bed last night a very definite reason visited me. I know the lay of the land of nearly all the work now save one--Brittany. And with the war against Rome coming up, and the whole complex of the Celtic migrations back and forth, I could well use a few days looking at Brittany. That would be the best reason for leaving England for a few days.--From Calais to Mont St. Michel. What do you think, Chase? And can you get me some geographical and historical material on the area with reference both to the myth and to the Brittany of Malory's time which will be what he himself has seen. This makes much sense to me, however, killing two birds.

  Time for me to go to work. I'll finish this letter later. I have finished Balin and I am pooped. But I do think I got something in it. I dearly hope so.

  Now I must set out my lettuces in flats so that they can get bigger before I set them out in the garden. I start the seeds in my window sill.

  TO CHASE--SOMERSET, MAY 4, 1959

  Another week starting. Elaine and Mary off to Wells which gives me a fine long day for work. Start Torre and Pellinore, marriage of Guinevere etc. Half the typed Merlin came back. The rest early this week and I will get a carbon off to you and Elizabeth with strong hope that you will like it. After you have read it I suggest that you go back to Malory and see what I have done. You will instantly know why. I put the Balin on tape yesterday and listened to it back and it sounds pretty good. There will have to be lots of refinement of course in all of it but the essence is there and I can't find that I have missed much from the original. It is most painstaking work. You will notice that I have removed all of Merlin's prophecies having to do with future stories. They simply blow the point. Also Malory never could lead to a climax. He gave it away three times before he came to it. The hardest work was the battle. Nothing will be that hard again--am removing the tiresome detail and at the same time keeping action and plan of battle. But there are such profundities in Malory sometimes hidden in a phrase. I have to be very careful not to miss them and sometimes to blow them up a little to make them apparent.

  TO ERO--SOMERSET, MAY 5, 1959

  The last part of the Merlin should be in type today and I will get a carbon off to you right away by air mail. I shall be on needles to know what you think of it. Meanwhile I am well into Torre and Pellinore, the first of the questing stories and the beginning of the Round Table. From this point on Arthur becomes a hero and almost without character. But this is the nature of all heroes and to make him human might be a revolution. God knows he is surrounded by humans and maybe that is necessary--the contrast. Actually Arthur becomes a little like the Caliph in the Arabian Nights--a kind of referee of adventures and one who devotes himself to a kind of mild commentary. I don't know what I am going to do about that. But every day is a challenge of major proportions. Every day something.

  Now it is afternoon and the Merlin typescript has come back. I think I will go to Bruton a little later and mail it to you because I fervently want you to see it. Am I off on the wrong foot? It seems right to me but I can be very wrong. There must be some reason why no one has done this properly. Maybe it is because it can't be done--but I don't really believe that. I think the reason is that they tried to make it costume instead of universal. Well, anyway, you will know. And good or bad, I have a feeling that the prose is good. Incidentally, I am sending no copy to anyone but you. I have an original and two carbons here. Does Chase want or need one? It needs lots of work I know but this is just a draft.

  The Post Office is going to go mad when I send it air mail. They think we are terribly extravagant anyway and this is going to make them think I am nuts. We give them more business than the whole town of Bruton.

  Oh well--here we go. And I am well into Torre and Pellinore today.

  Love to all there. I'm sorry I'm so nervous about this but after all, I've been at it a long long time and this is the first and acid test--the hardest story and the first.

  TO CHASE--SOMERSET, MAY 7, 1959

  A small warm-up before my day's work. I finished Gawain's quest in Torre and Pellinore yesterday and continue with the second quest today. I hope to finish the whole thing sometime during the weekend.

  I now have an architect's board that sits on a table and what a difference it makes. I don't get so tired leaning over--I shall not finish this today, because as surely as I write to you, I get a letter by return mail. Please do let me know of your reaction to the work I have sent when you get a chance. Maybe I'd better send two copies from now on. I am having an original and three carbons made.

  Now it is Sunday and I have just finished the Three Quests. Tomorrow the Death of Merlin and if I am lucky next week Morgan le Fay, which is short. But it does more and I think I discovered some gold in the Quests. Of course the real things are to come.

  Now Monday again. These weeks run by and disappear like rabbits in a shooting gallery. We've been here two months. Can you imagine that? I can't. It seems such a short time that I feel I haven't got enough work done and I know that isn't true. I have done a lot. This flimsy paper is very unsatisfactory to write on. I love the foolscap, even the white British
foolscap.

  I got some typescript on Wednesday and will send it along--It will be much more of Malory than the Merlin, where I have always felt that he was floundering with his material. Today I start the Death of Merlin, a ghastly job, the ridiculous defeat of a great man, adored in all ages. I'll have to see what I can do with it. It's the banana-peel treatment, the great leveler. And it is time I got to it because there may be some false starts.

  TO CHASE--SOMERSET, MAY 11, 1959

  The fact of the matter is that there isn't enough time in a day to do what I want to do. I finished the Death of Merlin and the Five Kings yesterday. And today go on with Morgan le Fay. I like my version of the end of Merlin. It's a sad and a general story. Perhaps that is why it has lasted. It and the Marriage will go to be typed on Wednesday.

  Planted three dozen lettuce plants yesterday and among the grasses in the back garden I found a number of strawberry plants all in blossom and cleared the rack away from them. I find all sorts of things back there.

  My spelling--never very sure and fixed--has become completely infected by Malory. Batayle seems much more normal than battle--more warlike somehow even if it doesn't mean the same thing as battle.

  What a way to live! I worked very hard yesterday what with writing and cutting grass with a scythe. Went to bed at nine o'clock before it was dark and instantly to sleep. A mist on the meadows this morning with the sun burning through. Everyone agrees that this is the most beautiful spring in many years. And some who have been burned by the last few seasons say we will pay for it later. Well, we shall see.

  I may want to get out but I hate to. Also, I resent anything that interrupts the slow, steady flow of this translation. I feel that it is getting a flow and a good tone now.

  Time's up now. A-working we must go.

  I'll get this off.

  TO ERO AND CHASE--SOMERSET, MAY 13, 1959

  Then your comments and Chase's almost lack of comment on the section sent to you. I must think very carefully and not fall into obscurity in my answer. To indicate that I was not shocked would be untrue. I was. I wonder if the three thousand miles makes any difference. It is apparent that I did not communicate my intention but I wonder whether I could have if I had been there. It is natural to look for arguments in my defense or in defense of the work as I am doing it. Let me say first that I hope I am too professional to be shocked into paralysis. The answer seems to be that you expected one kind of thing and you didn't get it. Therefore you have every right to be confused as you say and disappointed. I had never told you what my plan was, perhaps because I was feeling my way. I can say that this is uncorrected first draft, designed to establish style and method, and that the slips and errors will be removed, but that isn't good enough. Perhaps I thought I had told you that I am presently trying--not to bring up the whole cycle with its thousand ramifications, but to stick tight to Malory, who wrote in the fifteenth century. And all the reading and research is not wasted, because I see and I think understand things in Malory I could not have seen before. Finally, I have had no intention of putting it in twentieth-century vernacular any more than T.M. put it in fifteenth-century vernacular. People didn't talk that way then either. For that matter, people didn't talk as Shakespeare makes them talk except in the bumpkin speeches. These are all negatives, I know.

  I know you have read T. H. White's Once and Future King. It is a marvelously wrought book. All the things you wished to find in my revision are superlatively in that. But that is not what I had wanted and I think still do not want to do.

  Where does the myth--the legend--start? Back of the Celtic version it stretches back to India and probably before. It splits on the migration--part going to Greece, part to Semitic exits, part coming up through Georgia and Russia and Germany to Scandinavia and crammed with the Norse and part in Iberia and Celtic Gaul flooding up to Britain, Ireland, Scotland, where it incubates and there moves out again all over the world. Where do you stop it or limit it? I chose to start with Malory who was the best writer, better than the French, better than the parts of the Mabinogion and closer to our general understanding. White brilliantly puts the story in the dialects of present-day England. I did not want to do that. I wanted an English that was out of time and place as the legend is. The people of legend are not people as we know them. They are figures. Christ is not a person, he is a figure. Buddha is a squatting symbol. As a person Malory's Arthur is a fool. As a legend he is timeless. You can't explain him in human terms any more than you can explain Jesus. As a person Jesus is a fool. At any time in the story he could have stopped the process or changed the direction. He has only one human incident in the whole sequence--the lama sabach-thani on the cross when the pain was too great. It is the nature of the hero to be a fool. The Western sheriff, the present literary prototype as exemplified by Gary Cooper, is invariably a fool. He would be small and mean if he were clever. Cleverness, even wisdom, is the property of the villain in all myths. I am not writing this to titillate the ear of the twentieth century. Perhaps I am overambitious, but I am trying to make it available, not desirable. I want the remote feeling of the myth, not the intimate feeling of today's man who in his daily thought may change tomorrow but who in his deeper perceptions, I am convinced, does not change at all. In a word I have not been trying to write a popular book but a permanent book. I should have told you all of this.

  It has been my intention in all of this and still is, to follow each story with an--what can I call it?--essay, elucidation, addendum. In this I propose to put the reality, the speculative, the explanative, even perhaps the characterization, but I wanted to keep it separate. I do not know that Merlin was a Druid or the memory of a Druid and certainly Malory never suspected it. In the studies I can speculate that this may have been so, although I suspect that the Merlin conception is far older than Druidism. His counterpart is in every great cycle--in Greece, in the Bible, and in the folk myths, back to the beginning. Chase says wisely that Saxon and Saracen are probably the same thing. Foreigners from far off. They always occur. To Malory the most recent mysterious and powerful strangers were Saracens. Saxons, unless he was a Celt, were part of himself, even though he probably thought of himself as of Norman descent--for social reasons.

  Very well, you will say--if that is your intention, where are those comments which intend to illuminate? Well, they aren't written for two reasons. First, I'm learning so much from the stories, and second, I don't want to break the rhythm. I found there was a rhythm, and I was pleased with it. Also, by their nature, these stories must be spare. In the additions I have made, I've tried to keep that spareness.

  I know I seem to be defining my thesis and that's exactly what I am doing. But there are some things I don't understand. You say the killing of the babies is an unkingly retelling of the Herod story. But that is the theme of the whole legend. The Herod story is simply another version of the timeless principle that human planning cannot deflect fate. The whole legend is a retelling of human experience. It is a version of "Power corrupts."

  You will understand that what saddened me most was the tone of disappointment in your letter. If I had been skeptical of my work, I would simply have felt that you had caught me out. But I thought I was doing well, and within the limits I have set for myself, I still do.

  The first story is by far the most shapeless, the most difficult and the most loaded.

  The story of the Knight with the Two Swords is more direct but not less mysterious.

  Finally, and I won't labor the point after this, I feel that I am reaching toward something valuable. It doesn't sound like me because I don't want it to. And it occurs to me to wonder whether you would prefer that I don't send the stories as they are done, but wait until the very end when the between chapters are in place. I had thought at the end of four or four hundred and fifty pages, to go back and complete that part, since it will be one volume, before going on. There may be two versions, one simply the translation and the other the translation plus the inner chapters. As for the
translation I am sure of one thing--it is the best by far of any that has been done. But you must let me know about this. On this end--Mais, je marche!

  TO ERO--SOMERSET, MAY 14, 1959

  Now I have thought a day and throbbed through a night since I rewrote the letter. Also I have corrected somewhat the copy enclosed. The first was uncorrected, and I still feel about the same. Maybe I am not doing it well enough. But if this is not worth doing as I am trying to do it, then I am totally wrong, not only about this but about many other things, and that is of course quite possible. Alan Lerner is making a musical about King Arthur and it will be lovely and will make a million-billion dollars--but that isn't what I want. There's something else. Maybe in my rush to defend myself I've missed what I wanted to say. Maybe I'm trying to say something that can't be said or do something beyond my ability. But there is something in Malory that is longer-lived than T. H. White and more permanent than Alan Lerner or Mark Twain. Maybe I don't know what it is--but I sense it. And as I have said--if I'm wrong then it's a real whopping wrongness.

  But, can't you see--I must gamble on this feeling about it. I know it isn't the form the present-day ear accepts without listening but that ear is somewhat trained by Madison Avenue and radio and television and Mickey Spillane. The hero is almost bad form unless he is in a Western. Tragedy--true tragedy--is laughable unless it happens in a flat in Brooklyn. Kings, Gods and Heroes--Maybe their day is over, but I can't believe it. Maybe because I don't want to believe it. In this country I am surrounded by the works of heroes right back to man's first entrance. I don't know how the monoliths were set up in the circles without tools but there was something more involved than petty thievery and schoolboy laziness and the anguish of overfed ladies on the psycho couch. Someone moved a whole lot of earth around for something beyond "making a buck." And if all of this is gone, I've missed the boat somewhere. And that could easily be.